[2] M. D. Taseer was born in Ajnala, Amritsar district, Punjab,[3] on 28 February 1902[1] to a family of Kashmiri ancestry.
His research supervisor Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch asked the University Senate to allow him to work on his PhD without obtaining an M. Litt first.
[7] Taseer is said to be the first person from the Indian subcontinent to have obtained a PhD in English Literature in England,[6][1] but it is not true because Taseer completed his PhD at Cambridge in 1936,[8] whereas Saiyid Abdul Latif, was awarded a doctorate in English literature from the University of London in 1924.
[9] On his return from Cambridge at the end of 1935, Taseer joined the Muslim Anglo-Oriental (MAO) College in Amritsar as its principal.
[11][12] In 1937 Taseer fell in love with a British tourist named Christobel George, who had also been a student at Cambridge.
[6] His daughter Salma Mahmud published a memoir The Wings of Time, recounting his life.